Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America

by Nick Salvatore

Overview

A prizewinning historian pens this biography of C.L. Franklin, the greatest African-American preacher of his generation, father of Aretha, and civil rights pioneer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316160377
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	02/03/2005
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

Editorial Reviews

In hese days of growing affinity between evangelical Christians and the right, Nick Salvatore's life and times of the Rev. C. L. Franklin -- ''the preacher with the golden voice'' -- Singing in a Strange Land is a reminder of an earlier, happier age. Although Franklin's theological underpinnings were, like those of many other black ministers of his day and ours, deeply conservative, his politics were staunchly progressive. Pastor of Detroit's New Bethel Baptist Church from 1946 until 1979 (when he was shot by burglars and entered a coma that lasted until his death more than five years later), and one of the leading figures in the Northern branch of the civil rights movement, Franklin helped set the tone of protest in the Motor City and beyond … Salvatore spent hundreds of hours in Detroit talking with relatives and friends of Franklin and older members of the New Bethel congregation. He seems to have absorbed much of the city's distinctive political history, and to have tapped into the soul that moved Franklin in song and sermon and that thrived beneath the beat of Motown.
— The New York Times

Angela D. Dillard